PCI Express graphics reliability/functionality in 6.1?

[Stephane E. Potvin]

Clifton Royston wrote:
>   I'm soon to build myself a new AMD X2 workstation system on which I
> plan to multiboot various operating systems including FreeBSD, a couple
> Linux distros and probably Windows XP Pro, and probably also run
> virtualization software (VMWare and/or Xen.) I'm hoping for it to last
> me through a few years of occasional upgrades, which makes me dubious
> about choosing an AGP motherboard.
> 
>   I can't find anything specific about PCI Express in the 6.1 release
> notes.  However, I have Googled up some reports of various PCI-E
> graphic cards working badly in Xorg under FreeBSD and other open source
> OSes.  In general should PCI Express graphics cards work properly and
> perform reasonably well for Xorg and OpenGL graphics under FreeBSD, if
> I avoid the "touchier" nVidia cards, or do I need to stick with AGP for
> reliability?
> 
>   If there's a better mailing list for getting an authoritative answer
> to this, I'd appreciate the pointer.

I have an nVidia GeForce Go 7800 connected on a PCI Express 16X bus
which is working very well under Xorg with FreeBSD Current and the
nvidia driver from ports. It's connected to a 945PM chipset from Intel.
So far it's been very stable and it's been giving me very good
performances with UT2004 and Quake3. The only time I've got crashes what
when I tried to use one of the raster modes on the syscon console. The
system would crash trying to map the syscon framebuffer when I switched
to any vt.

Steph